Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong Il, dictator of North Korea, died on December 17th, aged 69 or 70

IT WAS all bogus, he said once. The gaggle of pretty young women jumping up and down at a state reception, screaming out praises of Kim Jong Il, didn't really mean it. It was a lie, too, he said, to show North Korean children on television with plump, rosy cheeks singing hymns to the Motherland. It would have been more truthful to show them in rags and starving. But he preferred to maintain the illusion.

Had he not been born the son of Kim Il Sung—still North Korea's Great Leader and eternal president—and therefore Son of God, Mr Kim might have been a filmmaker. He wrote a book “On the Art of Cinema” and owned perhaps 20,000 films, of which his favourites were “Friday the 13th” and “Godzilla”. Because North Korean films seemed perfunctory to him, he kidnapped a South Korean director, Shin Sang-ok, to shoot a “Godzilla” of his own devising. There was really no need. He had inherited his own set, North Korea, on which to shoot his own disaster movie: small fat man, with nuclear capability and supreme indifference to the fate of his own people, runs rings round world.

To many, the plot seemed absurd. The hero was improbable, with Babygro zipped-up suits stretched over his pot belly, oversized sunglasses, platform shoes and bouffant hair, all adding precious height and heft to his five feet two inches. For years, too, he was invisible: not seen by the world until the 1970s, improbably taking English lessons from Dom Mintoff in Malta, and never heard in North Korea until he came briefly to the microphone, at a parade in 1992, to cry “Glory to the heroic soldiers!” Yet since the 1960s he had been a feared force in his father's Propaganda and Agitation Department: eliminating internal rivals, possibly plotting foreign assassinations (the Korean Air bombing of 1987, in which 115 died, and the Rangoon bombing of 1983, killing three South Korean ministers, were both attributed to him), building up the cult of his father in statues and birthday celebrations and, incidentally, stoking high the cult of himself.

Sun and fog

That fairytale film began with his birth, in 1942 in a log cabin frosted with February snow at a revolutionary training camp on holy Mount Paektu: his coming foretold by a swallow, accompanied by a double rainbow and a new star in the heavens. (His actual birth, in Russia's Far East a year earlier, was dull and forgotten.) He learned to walk in three weeks, to talk in eight; he wrote six operas and 1,500 books while a student at Kim Il Sung University, and scored five holes-in-one in his first game of golf. Apart from being “the greatest writer who ever lived” and “greatest musical genius”, he was, by diktat, the Glorious General from Heaven, the Guiding Star of the 21st Century, and more than 200 other things. His bad temper could shake buildings; his cheerier moods could melt ice; and on a visit to South Korea fog shrouded him to keep him safe from snipers.

The ideas that guided North Korea—from juche, or self-reliance, to songun, or “military first”, were also his own great creation, as much as his father's. Both were disastrous in a country which, after 1991, had lost its Soviet subsidies and was on the brink of economic collapse. The subsequent famine of the mid-1990s killed perhaps 1m people, or 5% of the population: most from sheer starvation, others from the effects of eating grass. Meanwhile the Dear Leader dined on shark's-fin soup, gulped sashimi cut from living fish, sent his chefs to Naples to learn the art of thin-crust pizza, and chose wines from a cellar of 10,000 bottles—as well as deciding, in his “warm benevolence”, that the answer to hunger was to breed giant rabbits.

No one advised him. Where his father had accepted counsel, young Mr Kim saw it as a sign of disloyalty. The groups of extravagantly capped commanders who attended him were there to smile fawningly in the background as he made his minute, tireless inspections of cucumbers, cheese, pipe-valves or barley fields. And they were also there to prove that the army was important to the man who had been made head of it, in 1991, without a shred of military experience—unless you counted the cinematic days when, as a child, he trained alongside his father's fighters with a wooden rifle, and dreamed of killing Japanese with it. That was his best toy until, in 2006, he tested a nuclear device, using it to scare the Americans witless and to pressure the world into sending in food.

Even as it did so, outsiders mocked him. Inside the country, no one dared. Mr Kim knew exactly how the population lined up: loyal core, 5-25%; wavering, 50-75%; hostile, 8-27%. But those who dissented—even in a whisper, even by hanging his portrait askew—ended in prison camps, subject to forced labour and starvation. Perhaps one in 20 North Koreans passed through Mr Kim's gulags. Possibly 200,000 remain there. The rest were either brainwashed or, as he said, pretended to be.

His death, too, might well have been scripted by himself: on one of his beloved trains (he feared flying), as he visited his people to offer “on-the-spot guidance”, while a snowstorm paused, and the holy mountain of his birth glowed red with the rising Sun. “Forgive me,” he once said to Shin, as he half-heartedly apologised for kidnapping and imprisoning him. “I was playing a role.” To the bitter end.